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IBM Joins OpenOffice.org Community
Petrushka writes "In a press release today, with accompanying press FAQ, IBM announces a change in its relationship to the OpenOffice.org development community. The upshot is that they're making a long-term commitment to OOo; no organization has paid off any other organization for this; they're devoting about 35 of their developers in China to OOo; and they'll be contributing accessibility code from Lotus Notes to improve current support for assistive technologies. You may recall that an alleged shortage of assistive technologies that work with OOo has been one of the big criticisms leveled against the idea of governments standardizing on the OpenDocument format, which is a file format that OOo and several other office suites support."
OpenOffice.org itself doesn't lack assistive technologies. OOo on Windows lacks assistive technologies. OOo with GNOME or KDE integration gets the accessibility technologies of GNOME or KDE, respectively.
Still, it's a welcome sight to see IBM participating in OOo development. OOo just keeps improving with every new release, and I find that I use it more than Microsoft Office, although I have both installed at work and at home.
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IBM has its own office package: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/sma rtsuite/
Is this another case of the one division not knowing what the other does, or is IBM giong to drop smartsuite?
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You're misinformed... OpenOffice.org has a few Java components (notabily in Base, I think) but it is not a Java application. You don't even need a JRE to run it.
It's also worth pointing out here that the upcoming version of IBM's Lotus Notes product includes internal support for ODF documents (.odt, .ods and .odp). Based on what I see in the beta, it looks to me like the ODF support is provided by an embedded and tweaked version of OOo, but I think it's still worth adding Lotus Notes to the list of apps that support ODF.
Notes 8 is built on the Eclipse RCP, BTW, and runs nicely on Linux (which is my platform of choice) as well as Windows and OS X. I imagine it can run just about anywhere Java does. To be honest, I don't think the new version is hugely better than previous versions, and I've never been a big fan of Notes, but for Linux users whose companies use Notes it's really nice to have a native client rather than mucking about with Notes under WINE, or running a Windows OS on another box or in a VM. As an OOo user, it's also very nice to know that I'll soon be able to send ODF documents to my colleagues secure in the knowledge that they can read them.
Disclaimer: I work for IBM, but I'm not a spokesman for IBM. IBM is happy about that state of affairs, and so am I.
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I've used and programmed Lotus Notes on and off for the past 10 years. It's not that bad for what it does. For a networked environment the database replication was way ahead of it's time, and it still has no real competitor in that field. OK, so the field has moved on; and the interface is shit. Still, admin wise it's pretty good, and IBM has done a lot of good work with Notes.
We've rolled out a wiki in the same breath as running a huge Notes infrastructure. What I don't understand is that, as crap as the Notes interface is, it's still way ahead of any browser for editing documents. Anyway, so the Notes database is the back-end, and the web-browser is the new client. Call it a wiki, and people love it. Call it Notes database and they'll run a mile. I suppose it must say something about the whole thing.
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